Just a quick reminder to please check out the LJ Idol entries for this week. There are two sets of entries and two polls, and we're down to the Top Six (so, 12 entries in all). I'm hoping to make it through this week, so every vote helps!

Today we visited Washington's Mt. Vernon estate. It was beautiful and huge, and I can't imagine living there without air-conditioning. Like the previous few days, it was so hot and muggy today that we just sweated through all our clothes until we became soggy and miserable. I honestly don't know how people manage to wear business suits in this weather. Even just a t-shirt and shorts were too much! Tomorrow should be an interesting situation, what with cool clothes needed for DC roaming and then fresh, moderate clothes for the lengthy airplane trips back. Plus, packing sweaty clothes back in with the regular clothes. :O

I wish we'd had time to go to the museum store at the National Art Gallery yesterday. It was huge. On Thursday, we spent so much time fooling around at the Natural History Museum store that we felt compelled to buy something. First, there were lobster and squid hats, a plush squid, and then various assorted plastic squid, octopi, and crustaceans to photograph and send to our daughter, who has a crustacean phobia. This goes along with the pictures of a boiled shrimp and an official t-shirt-with-happy-idiot crawdad, from our dinner at Hot and Juicy on Wednesday night. The boiled shrimp picture prompted a STAHP response, and I'm not sure she ever saw the t-shirt. She says she ignored the offerings from the Museum Store (boooo! Those were the "We're thinking of you!" photos), which means she never saw the plush narwhal picture we also sent. Seriously—there's a whole narwhal thing going on at that museum right now. My son and I each bought a small, chubby, derpy-looking plastic dinosaur creature at that store, as entertainment payback. But there were a lot of cute plush toys there.

Oh, and for random amusement, we started and finished watching Stranger Things while staying in D.C. We all enjoyed that a lot. Now I've finally persuaded HalfshellHusband and the boy to try out Awake, even though it was cancelled after one season. Still, what an intriguing show.

Okay, off to bed. There's packing and other logistics tomorrow, plus a trip to the National Portrait Gallery, which our daughter raves about. Though she was "meh" on the National Art Gallery (I could have spent a whole day there), and she told us that the Air and Space Museum wasn't all that great (the rest of us spent FOUR HOURS there, just on Space plus the Wright Brothers, as I said). So, you know. Her judgment might be a little suspect. But still, those are the plans.

Hope you're all enjoying the weekend, and that it's less hot wherever you are...

HalfshellHusband and I watched an entire season of Burn Notice on vacation once, via Torrent files, and that was when I accidentally discovered the unique fun of watching a TV show in English but with French subtitles. It added a whole new element of weird to the experience, when you literalized the translations to things like, "Wow, that really visits the house, Mike" or "I am desolate" (no you're not, you're hardly even sorry!)

We love Stranger Things! So glad there's to be a season 2. Last summer we saw Mt. Vernon. It was under some renovation, so I don't think we saw it in all its glory, but we could imagine. I got the creeps by the bedroom where George Washington died. That NHS Museum store does suck you in and keep you there! LOL Any place w shiny, cool, pretty rocks, and it's game over! LOL

Stranger Things was amazingly good! There was a reason I put that in my streaming queue. Namely, too, we watched it because it was one of the few things in my queue that was TV-14 instead of TV-MA, and our son was there.

We spent most of our NHS Museum store time in the one downstairs, I think-- which had a lot of the mammal and sea-life stuff. My son took pictures of a lot of giraffe toys, to post on Snapchat at his 6'5" friend, and the dinosaur "grabber" toy got his attention too. Plus the narwhal hat.

By contrast, the offerings at the National Portrait Gallery/American Art Gallery shop were downright snooty. As opposed to the Van Gogh weirdness and Botticelli-themed stuff that surely would have been in the gigantic National Art Gallery store. :(